1 (Pregame, in Mirror)

I’ve thought about this for years now, writing for a reason not related to my paycheck. The pressure that I have heaped upon myself to have the tiniest droplet of intestinal fortitude and merely begin has been suffocating for long stretches of time. In the past two years or so, I’ve finally convinced myself to start, and it has created a great sense of relief in my heart, and that has slowly manifested in a more positive and less cynical approach to my daily life. Once you know you’re going to do something, the little man inside you replaces doubt with dopamine, and so it is written. Despite the very moment I type this sentence, I have not actually completed this first piece and haven’t even mapped it out through completion. When you know, you know. 

A truth so self-evident that it compels action that alters the course of the discoverer’s remaining life. That’s how profound and important the idea behind whatever this becomes is to me, and yet…no cool name for the website. Why would such trifles bother someone who has had such an epiphany, you ask? Just write and eventually the title will come, you say?  

 I agree, said this member of the choir to you, the preacher of sage wisdom bombs! This has been my standard naming convention process for as long as I can remember, in fact. HOWEVAH, the purchasing of the website & domain and designing it and all that other cosmetic and magnificently-timewasting shit somehow became the quick-and-infatuating alternative to the substance of the site itself. There are layers of self-rationalizing behavior within me so thick and deep that it takes me years to uncover the first metacarpal fossil of the psychological skeleton. Another six months to actually figure out what the fuck it is I unearthed is then followed by an unspecified amount of time trying to understand how it got there.  Another three years between the first draft of this to the final version.

In any event, I came up with a couple of ideas for a title and tossed them aside, mainly because the domain names had already been taken, and I didn’t want to use a .org for this thing as I see myself as “profit-ambivalent” and it wouldn’t be right. There was no .edu option, which somehow seems less disingenuous to me for some reason. There were some cool newer options, none of which I can currently remember, but for a person who first learned HTML in 1994 and has many Netscape Navigator Composer site credits on his CV, the classic .com just means a little more. Name recognition is key, after all, and I think any website with a .shop domain is very mid. 

I picked a name, registered the domain, let it expire, and picked a new one. I’m going with it. Five Peas is what it shall be. This is not a reference to the vegetable/legume, but to the rating system used amongst a specific group of individuals I consider my closest friends. It is a play on The Source magazine’s album rating system and an abbreviation of “props.” For example, I once drove to a friend’s wedding several states away unannounced, popped my head through an open window where my friends were drinking, and quoted a classic film by shouting “MESSAGE!” in a perfect and unexpected recreation. This was worthy of 5 p’z – the highest compliment possible amongst the group. I went with this name for this site because I’m writing for a very specific group of people, and anyone who is connects to the undercurrent of my writing will quickly become one with the peas. It is a tribute and a keycard.

 The bigger “why” is related to my motivation for creating this place. I occasionally forget the finer details of the “why,” as they become blurry components of the bigger picture, replaced in my working memory by the heuristic “because I must.” This, I have found, gives me just enough motivation to plan to write but rarely actually write.   

In that vein, I was reading my personal journal entries from today’s date over the past twenty-some years of writing and it helped me refocus one of the components of “why.” There has been a gradual dimming of my creative bulbs over the past few years that has become very evident when reading entries from ten or fifteen years ago. I know that to lose that light completely would be debilitating as I reached old age, psychologically & emotionally. It would be the only regret (so far, so good) of my life, and I can’t be sure I’d fully emerge from its consequences.  

 I need to engage in something that demands practice, repetition, discipline, and sincerity. I want to experience the youthful hope and joy I see in how I wrote and thought as a young man through a not-so-young man’s experience and humility. I think it requires a level of sustained effort I haven’t expended in a very long time, and I want to match that level. I’m hesitant to type that maybe for the first time in my life, I’m not sure.  I’m doing this now because I’m no longer comfortable leaving any doubt whatsoever that I gave something everything I could when I know I’m capable. I can’t keep believing the excuses. Now.

 In all honesty, I just want to get the shit out there. I don’t know if I want to hear comments (of course I do), I don’t know what the details are just yet, and I haven’t thought about anything really tangible. I want to write regularly and publish pieces for a year and then see what’s up. I have nothing beyond that, and there’s no quantifiable positive outcomes, I don’t think. Perhaps that’s naïve, or maybe the writing will be that GAS and the viral load of unique visitors to these pages will ignite the capitalist flame within, leading to merch and subscriptions and speaking dates. I truly hope not.

All jokes aside, this is both necessary and sufficient for me, and if anyone outside of the five people to whom I send direct links ever reads a single word on this site, it’s a bonus. I hope those people who receive the direct links consider the work worthy of the coveted 5 p’z.